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10-15-14 In a bid to shake off its Soviet legacy, authorities in central Ukraine’s Poltava region have pledged to strip the area of 117 monuments of Vladimir Lenin within a month.

More than one hundred monuments have already been removed, but 117 remain standing, all of which are to be taken down by Nov. 24, Poltava Governor Viktor Bugaichuk said in a statement on the regional administration’s website.

In Soviet times, every inhabited town and official building was required to have a full-body statue or bust of Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union.

Most of those remain standing as historical mementos, but in Ukraine, growing anti-Russian sentiment has made the Lenin statues a target.

The deadline for the sweeping purge of Lenin statues on Nov. 24 coincides with Ukraine’s official remembrance day for the Holodomor — a state-orchestrated famine that devastated southern swathes of the Soviet Union, killing between 4 million and 8 million people, most of whom were Ukrainian.